


The Smallest Ace

by DK65



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Gen, world war ii au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-11
Updated: 2016-06-11
Packaged: 2018-07-14 11:11:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7168676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DK65/pseuds/DK65
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tyrion Lannister's role in World War II, during the Battle of Britain...<br/>These characters belong to GRRM.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Smallest Ace

Although he was but a dwarf, Tyrion believed he could do anything his elder brother Jaime or his uncles Gerion and Tygett could do. And for a small man, he did have a remarkably large brain—he was able to design a saddle for himself that cradled him front and back and enabled him to ride any horse in his father’s stables. So when flying became all the craze after the Great War—in which his brother fought in the Lafayette Brigade, his Uncle Tygett died of influenza and his Uncle Gerion flew planes—Tyrion was just as determined to have flying lessons as was any American man his age. Luckily for him, the Lannisters had funded the creation of several aeronautical engineering firms, because of Uncle Gerion’s interest in the subject, so Tyrion was able to get a plane that he could easily control and fly on his own. He took the plane with him to England, when he became a Rhodes scholar, and joined Oxford University’s Flying Club. Flying and horse-riding were his major recreations, in a world that was recovering from the carnage of the war and the Russian Revolution with an excess of hedonism.

Tyrion was no puritan—he was a devout Catholic, as were all the Irish who had left their homeland after the potato famine in the 1840s—but he was discreet in his pleasures. He had no wish to be dragged back to Casterly, that dusty town in California, kicking and screaming, his liberty curtailed for a lifetime. It had been his principal aim in life to escape his father’s control by using his gifts to forge a life for himself, and he would let nothing come in the way. He longed for love, but was realistic enough to accept that no woman would love him at first sight. However, he hoped that she might grow to love him, if she came to know him well. So if he was attracted to a woman, he made his feelings known and they frequently worked out a mutually satisfactory arrangement, but he had yet to find the kind of love immortalized by jazz singers and Hollywood films.

He’d spent most of his life in this manner—completing his programme of studies in Oxford; becoming a professor himself; writing on economics and politics for various publications and providing advice, when asked to, by the English branch of his father’s firm, whilst enjoying the company of a lengthy list of young women. Jaime had proved to be a disappointment to Tywin Lannister—he had graduated at the top of his class at West Point, but had not accepted a commission in the US Army, because Tywin wanted him to work for Lannister’s, the savings and investment bank he had set up. However, Jaime had used the Great War as an excuse to enlist in the Lafayette Brigade, had distinguished himself in action and then, after the war, had refused to marry and chosen to become the finest jockey in Britain, leaving his father sorely puzzled.

Tywin had no one else to turn to, other than Tyrion, for Cersei was now finally wedded to an English aristocrat (Robert Baratheon, Duke of Dragonstone and Marquess of Storm’s End) and mother to three fine golden-haired and green-eyed children; Tygett was dead; Gerion was too busy flying all over the world and Kevan, who had always been his right hand, even when they were boys, could not be everywhere at once, even though he had the best will in the world. Tywin refused to even consider his late wife Joanna’s brother Stafford, whom he thought a fool—he left him to manage his vineyards and orange groves, which was all he was fit for. Tyrion, thank God, had turned out to be clever enough—all those professors at Harvard and Oxford could not be wrong. So Tyrion divided his time, much to his profit, between Oxford, where he wrote, taught and lectured, and London, where he advised Lannister’s on investments.

Tywin was later to thank his lucky stars on getting Tyrion on board when the American stock market crashed in 1929. Tyrion had told his father that he thought too many people were investing in the stock market, which might well collapse under the pressure of all that money. So Tywin had gradually scaled back his and his clients’ investments, focusing on the core industries—iron, steel, railways, coal, transport... His was one of the few banks that did not fail.

Tyrion also advised his father to withdraw gradually from the continent—he felt that the Germans, under a Nazi leader, and the Italians, under the Fascists, were spoiling for a fight. He suggested his father focus on Great Britain, Canada and Australia if he wanted to invest outside the States—also in South Africa and Rhodesia. He was certain there would be war in Europe before the 1930s were over, and he was not wrong. Hitler’s desire for lebensraum—his takeover of Austria, Czechoslovakia and finally Poland—and the League of Nations’ weak-kneed responses to him—led Britain and France to declare war on Germany in September 1939.

Soon after this, the Recruiting Office at the RAF received a visit from an extremely ugly dwarf, with untidy silver blonde hair, squashed-in features under a bulging brow and mismatched eyes—one green and one black. The man claimed to be a professor from Oxford and said he could fly. He said he wanted to offer his services to the King. Although the officer on duty was sceptical when he saw the man, he took him in to meet his superior. Tyrion had brought along all the paperwork he would need, but...he met a snag.

“I’m sorry, Professor Lannister,” the senior-most official in charge of recruitment at the RAF responded, “I’m truly impressed by your will and your desire to fight the Nazis. However, we do have physical recruitment norms for pilots in the RAF. And I’m afraid you would not meet those at all. But you could help us in other ways, you know. We will need air raid wardens. We will need clever men like yourself to advise us on how to protect our planes from Nazi attacks on the ground. We will need men who can evaluate intelligence. In short, we will need men with your talents, but not in the air.”

Tyrion decided to accept the post he was offered by the RAF. They would not let him fly, but they would let him fight the Nazis, who, he felt, deserved a good beating for what they were doing to Europe. He evaluated intelligence, provided advice on camouflage (it was his idea to fill the airfields of southern England with plywood aircraft, which the Nazis could bomb to their heart’s content, while the actual aircraft was concealed in hangars) and he did his bit as an air raid warden in the summer and autumn of 1940, when the Nazis bombed Britain, hoping to push her to her knees. At that time, Jaime, who had joined the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) for France, was presumed to be a captive—Cersei, whose husband had died whilst evacuating soldiers from Dunkirk, had insisted on going home to the States with her children. She refused to let Joffrey, her eldest son, fight in the war, saying that his task was to care for her and his younger brother and sister. She had little or no love for Tyrion—she was horrified at the thought of Jaime being a captive of the Nazis and was determined to use the issue of his American citizenship to set him free. She did not seem to understand that, by taking the King’s shilling, Jaime could not be regarded as an American civilian.

Tyrion’s memories of the Battle of Britain are overshadowed by an incident that took place in August. He was visiting an airfield in the south of England—it matters not where. He used to fly to various airfields and back, because it was faster than taking a train or a car and because he had a custom-built Spitfire that he loved to show off. The pilots had been flying non-stop for several days—they were led by a dark-haired man at least six feet tall, half of whose face had been burned away—perhaps in a flying accident. He evidently came from Czechoslovakia, from a region that bordered Hungary, but spoke English exceptionally well. It was apparent that he and his men were worn out when an order came for the pilots to make yet another sortie, for he flatly refused to fly again that day. That’s when Tyrion offered to lead the sortie, much to the amusement of the other pilots, who thought he’d gone mad. He knew how to fly, but he had scarcely been trained as a fighter pilot, as they were. But he insisted, and got into his little plane, which he taxied out of the hangar. That’s when the other pilots, including the squadron leader (his name was Sandor, Tyrion was to recall years later) got into their planes and set off on their mission. They gestured to him to get back, but he would not stop, not for all the gold in Fort Knox, Casterly, the fields of South Africa, Rhodesia or Australia. He would fly, and he would return a hero, or die in the attempt. He was lucky to return home alive—his plane was fitted with eight 303” Browning machine guns, which he was able to fire against the Luftwaffe fighters that attacked them. When he returned to the airfield, he found his airplane peppered with bullet holes. It was fortunate that none of them had struck the engines, or, as the pilots remarked sardonically, he would have been fried alive in his machine.


End file.
